Never in human history has there been a nation so manipulative, pathetic and evil as the British Empire. It survived only because of its vast navy and “keeping the balance of power”, weakening the continental states then shifting their attention to more conspicuous, “real” threats like Napoleon.

Don’t forget it couldn’t have made it without constantly allying with other nations either, it could never do things alone against other formal Western powers.

Also it has precipitated much of the world’s problems, the ones we face now such as a perpetual war in the Middle East, screwing up the EU, destabilizing regimes all
across 3rd world countries, making countries poorer than what they already are, something we Americans do tol (don’t get me wrong) but you were the first.

Your nation should’ve been destroyed, that is the only logical conclusion that any good person can make of your twisted, psychopathic history.

To be fair America is one great big fuck off country and some places are infinitely better than others. There are places where a week seems like a year and even a day feels like too long and there are places where you think "you know, I could settle down here and bring up a kid", and most everything in between.

One of my growing list of regrets is never being able to tick "properly explore new york / manhatten" off my bucket list. Sigh.

A lot of people here seem to be confusing the word "white" with the phrase "white mater race". They are not synonyms, the "master race" part of the phrase is meaningful. Only a small minority of the nations commonly described as "white" have ever demonstrated that they are part of any sort of "master race". Almost all of the white nations have attempted to make themselves masters of other peoples, to have empires and to dominate significant sections of the planet and most of them have failed, which demonstrates that they are not part of any master race. Whole foreign continents speak English, Spanish and Portugese. French is a native language on 5 of 7 contents and Dutch is used natively on 4.
This map describes accurately which countries are and are not part of the white master race.

Yes that does make sense, haven't brewed tea in the pot in a while, I'll have to get some loose leaf in today when I pop out to get my Nan's birthday card. Might even treat myself to a packet of custard creams.

>>24015> Spoken Mandarin Chinese is fairly easy. The grammar is very straightforwardWell, you appear to be learning Mandarin Chinese at the moment, and I'm not stusying Chinese, so I shall not debate this statement.> the pronunciation is easy once you've got past the issue of tonality.> Hanzi characters are a pain in the arse, because you need to memorise thousands of them just to achieve basic literacy.These statements are proving my point, not yours, aren't they?> Computers have made life easier, because of the input system used to type Hanzi. You just type the word phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the computer shows you a menu of characters matching that pronunciation, a bit like predictive texting. As long as you can recognise the character, you don't need to remember exactly how it's drawn.That's a nice invention that does make life easier, no doubt about that. But one is probably not going to bring a laptop with themselves everywher, because it is normally heavy and doesn't fit in conventional bags. Is this character input method available for smartphones? If not, it is useful only if one is indoors.Also, what if you have to, shall we say, leave a short hand-written note to your Chinese-speaking colleague? Then one still has to draw the characters themselves, don't they? And that brings back the notorious pain in the arse, my point being that handwriting is still not completeley obsolete and ousted from our lives despite of the great advancement in IT.> Back in the bad old days, you needed to memorise both the character and the exact order in which the strokes were drawn, because that's how alphabetisation works with Hanzi. If you couldn't remember the stroke order, you couldn't look up a word in the dictionary or a name in the phone book.And this proves my statement once again.

So all in all, I am not convinced that Chinese is easier than Russian for a person whose mother tongue is an alphabetic language and hasn't got tonality. However, it might be easier for you to study Chinese than Russian if your mother tongue uses characters instead of an alphabet.

>>24016Actually, I meant to refer to the phenomenon of tonality in Chinese by my comment, the "4 ways" of pronunciation being the 4 tones that are used in Chinese. I just didn't happen to know the appropriate English term for that, because I used to read about Chinese and Japanese in Russian and it was comparatively long ago. Sorry for misleading wording.By the way, I appreciate your contribution regarding the Japanese system of reading the characters. I used to think there were only 2 readings of each Kanji character in Japanese, now I see there are actually 4 of them. Still, there is no tonality in Japanese as opposed to Chinese, and then there are Katakana and Hiragana, and even Romaji, so you can find your way around writing and saying things even at early stages of learning.

If you're taught well, tones really aren't all that difficult. Mandarin only has four tones and they're easy to recognise. It's a hurdle in the early stages, but it's more than made up for by the immense simplicity of spoken Chinese. There are only a few hundred syllables and the texts for learners are written entirely phonetically, so pronunciation is piss-easy. The grammar is simple and regular with no tenses, cases or genders. It's very easy to build up a large and useful vocabulary.

The written language is a pain in the arse, but it's a lot less of a pain in the arse thanks to technology. Pinyin input (the phonetic system based on the Latin alphabet) is available on smartphones, so you're not tied to a computer. My preferred dictionary app has optical character recognition, so I can point my phone at a newspaper or a road sign and instantly see both a transliteration and a translation. If I'm faced with an unfamiliar character, it takes me literally three seconds to find its meaning and pronunciation.

Handwriting is very close to being obsolete, especially in China. English people occasionally complain that young people are so dependent on computers that they're forgetting how to write, but in China that is literally true. A lot of younger Chinese people can't write fluently with a pen, because they do it so rarely. It's perfectly normal for native speakers to completely forget how to write common characters. If you're required to hand-write a brief note to a colleague, writing it in Pinyin would be slightly gauche but perfectly legible.

Chinese is still a difficult language, but technology has taken a lot of the sting out of the more difficult aspects. I'd estimate that technology has saved me several hundred hours of study compared to older methods. I learned handwriting to pass my HSK exams, but I probably wouldn't have bothered otherwise, which would have saved me another couple of hundred hours.

>>24019>The grammar is simple and regular with no tenses, cases or genders.
Sort of but not quite. In much the same way that we no longer decline nouns for case but rely on pronouns and prepositions, Mandarin does the same thing for tense. There's no conjugation, but instead you add a particle to describe the "aspect", which includes tense but also negation, completion and subjectivity. It's tense, but not as we know it.

Aspects are vastly simpler than tenses. You need to know a handful of characters and a few simple rules, rather than the complicated and inconsistent structures of most European languages. Conjugation is a nightmare and can massively impede vocab acquisition. Compare the twenty-odd forms of "manger" in French with the pleasingly simple "吃".